The self-driving car is a red herring • Hacker News Board

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#61

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:09 PM UTC

Super_Jambo wrote: post #8

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we'll see a lot of approximations of it. Autonomous taxis in predefined spaces (see Cruise, Waymo), trucks on highways (maybe changing to human drivers when entering/nearing cities). But no safe full self-driving for a while. Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.

Better public transit can't be leveraged into a monopoly though, it would just quietly improve peoples lives.

Of course it can, that's what most public transport companies are. They tend to be government subsidized.

There's very little competition because there is not much to compete for, except in longer distance rail and bus.

You also need permission from the city to use public stops, consult routes and times, which is a barrier of entry. Not an insurmountable one and nobody prohibits you from running private stops or garages. You can even negotiate the use of bus lanes or tram lines.

The other barrier is much higher capital investment. Both bus drivers, busses and stops are not cheap, while the margin on a ticket is thin. (Compared to taxi fleet.) But it can be done even encouraging competition - see South Korea for an example of where it worked.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#62

Post by marketingPro » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

question000 wrote: post #58

marketingPro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal reserve won't collapse, they have the ability to create money. The currency the federal reserve multiplies? That could collapse. Since 2020, the dollar menu is gone, home and stock prices skyrocketed. In a year I've seen ~30% inflation. There's no reason for the inflation to stop there. (Note, I have lots of investment, inflation may help me)

Ok make any kind of verifiable prediction about this and we will see if it happens or not.

Download taco Bell or McDonald's app. what is the current price for 400 calories? Mine is $1.30, in February this was $1.

For stock info, look it up. Not sure where to get historical real estate prices, I'm just looking for a second property and everything is at least 10% higher than in February as you need to offer more than the selling price in this economy.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#63

Post by question000 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

marketingPro wrote: post #62

question000 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok make any kind of verifiable prediction about this and we will see if it happens or not.

Download taco Bell or McDonald's app. what is the current price for 400 calories? Mine is $1.30, in February this was $1. For stock info, look it up. Not sure where to get historical real estate prices, I'm just looking for a second property and everything is at least 10% higher than in February as you need to offer more than the selling price in this economy.

Ok make a prediction about the "currency collapsing" and we will see. An actual prediction of the value of the currency not just a remark about prices seeming unusually high to you personally.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#64

Post by ckastner » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #25

ckastner wrote: post #5

> Some experts now predict that we may never achieve the original dream of a reliable fully self-driving car. And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. This is a non-starter in the post-pandemic age of austerity. Most state and local governments now struggle to merely maintain a much simpler, yet more fundamenta…

In most population dense parts of the country where traffic is a problem, there is no “side of the road” to dig a ditch into. It’s all built up.

I thought of this, too, but believed the solution to be even simpler than rural areas. Dense areas are taken care of even more (snow is plowed, etc.). There's also, much more data being constantly captured.

For example, Google Maps can already hyper-accurately predict traffic down to individual road sections simply by observing the position and speed of Android phones on the road.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#65

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #57

digital-cygnet wrote: post #23

I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the techno…

>"software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would. How so? It seems pretty evident to me that having separate, dedicated lanes should make it a lot easier. What I'd say is by far the biggest concern, human-driven traffic, is just completely eliminated with that.

It's not, but because rail is much stricter and the safety protocols semi-automated to fully automated, the self driving is much easier, and unexpected conditions much easier to detect because expected conditions are very uniform.

Self driving supervised trains can drive on non-ETS (not fully automated tracking and safety) rails too with additional precautions. Lines where trains are driven by humans, and where some safeties are manually operated, as long as the presence of those safeties and cars is programmed. These behave then more like driver assist and automated safety.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#66

Post by AdrianB1 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

itsoktocry wrote: post #46

AdrianB1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.

> When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?

It is possible, but hard, to calculate human performance, it was done very scientific in aviation since ~ 1950.

It is easier to do it if you consider 1% worst drivers, either older people with long reaction times, distracted drivers, drunk drivers etc. If you have a car that is obeying all traffic rules, it never goes above the speed limit and it has sensors that makes it brake before rear-ending other cars you are already better than the 1% limit. It is a simplistic approach, just giving an example of how 99% is not that hard to reach.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#67

Post by marketingPro » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:05 PM UTC

question000 wrote: post #63

marketingPro wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download taco Bell or McDonald's app. what is the current price for 400 calories? Mine is $1.30, in February this was $1. For stock info, look it up. Not sure where to get historical real estate prices, I'm just looking for a second property and everything is at least 10% higher than in February as you need to offer more than the selling price in this economy.

Ok make a prediction about the "currency collapsing" and we will see. An actual prediction of the value of the currency not just a remark about prices seeming unusually high to you personally.

I run a website that tracks food costs.

Not sure if you are looking for Data or a psychic. I do the former.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#68

Post by goodcanadian » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

clows wrote: post #13

question000 wrote: post #9

Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.

Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?

Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?

I'm really sick of this trope. I have been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 15 years. Yes, I still have to fix weird issues on occasion . . . about as frequently as I have to fix weird issues on my wife's Windows machine.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#69

Post by question000 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

marketingPro wrote: post #67

question000 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok make a prediction about the "currency collapsing" and we will see. An actual prediction of the value of the currency not just a remark about prices seeming unusually high to you personally.

I run a website that tracks food costs. Not sure if you are looking for Data or a psychic. I do the former.

Ok why do you believe this if you can't make one verifiable prediction that it will happen?

Will it happens tomorrow? In 20 years? In 5 months? It's just a feeling you have that isn't backed by data. I can't really ever disprove this because you're not really making any claim.

This is every FED conversation on HN. People totally believe hyperinflation is "just around the corner" but it never happens only standard normal levels of inflation always within FED projections.

What's your website BTW?

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#70

Post by specialist » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

digital-cygnet wrote: post #23

I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the techno…

Agree with your positive response.

Missing from this conjecture is a synthesis with car and bike sharing.

There will also be massive land use, zoning changes when there's 90% fewer personal cars. Unused capacity (parking, roads) freed up and repurposed.

The role for autonomous driving for moving people (vs turking cargo) will look very different when our cities look more like medieval villas and college campuses.

I still cannot even guess if the future will be more concentrated or more sprawl. So I've provisionally decided "both", but very different from today.